Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Winston County Assign-A-Highway

Hello! My name is Crystal Till and I am the program manager for Winston County’s very newly launched program called Assign-A-Highway. Through a partnership with Northwest Alabama Council of Local Governments (NACOLG) and Northwest Alabama Association of Resource, Conservation and Development and with help from Mr. Henshaw and the Winston County Office of Alabama Cooperative Extension System and of course our local county government we will be working with probationers assigned to our program to provide sustained litter removal from our roadsides. These probationers will be assigned to the program as part of their probation terms. We will then assign a section of highway roadsides that the probationer is responsible for keeping clean for the duration of the probation term. While the litter removal is unsupervised I will be regularly checking assigned areas.

This program is still in the very early stages of development however, it is being modeled after what has proven to be a very successful program in the state of Virginia. One of our goals in addition to utilizing the manpower of our probationers to clean up our area are to educate our community about litter problems. We hope to show how litter removal will contribute to the success of Winston County in many ways such as increasing tourism, enhancing industrial recruitment and reducing trash and debris that flows into our streams and lakes, thus improving water quality.

We are very excited about getting things “off the ground” to clean up our roadsides county wide.